ECI started BuildPass on one jobsite. Now it's rolling out company-wide.

Three Decades in Austin, One Constant Challenge

Engen Contracting Inc. — ECI to most of the people who work with them — has been building across Austin and Central Texas for the better part of three decades. Full-service commercial general contracting: ground-up projects and tenant improvements, the kind of work where the hard part was never the square footage.

"The main thing that makes a project complex is not the scale of it," says David Guzman, a superintendent at ECI. "It's the amount of trades and people and labor working day to day on each project. Managing all those people — that's the biggest challenge in construction."

That's the problem every superintendent knows, and most software makes it worse: keeping dozens of trades, inspections, and safety records straight without living behind a screen to do it.

The Old Way Cost Time They Didn't Have

Before BuildPass, ECI ran its projects on other construction platforms — Procore for document control, and various tools before that. They worked. They just took time to feed.

"The biggest limitation is the amount of time you need to spend to keep everything organized inside the platform," David says. For a superintendent, that time comes out of the only place it can: the field.

"You cannot be sitting at your computer every day. You need to be on the field, checking on everyone, 90, 95% of the day." When the paperwork wins, the project loses.

One Project at a Time

ECI didn't roll BuildPass out everywhere at once. It started on a single job.

"We were actually the first project where we started using BuildPass for ECI," David says. The difference showed up fast. "I've said to myself and to my peers — hey, this is working much better with BuildPass. Much faster. Much cleaner."

Word travelled. "When we told the company everything was going so well, they decided to expand it to other projects." That single pilot proved the model — and BuildPass has been rolling out to more ECI projects ever since, one team at a time as each crew comes on board.

What ECI Runs on BuildPass

The pre-install meeting is where it clicked for David. It used to mean building a checklist from scratch for every trade. Now BuildPass does it.

"Before BuildPass, I wasn't able to do a checklist for the pre-install meetings I have with the trades. BuildPass created them using AI — I just introduced what the trade was going to be doing, the drawings, the schedule. Everything was super easy."

From there it runs the day. "We do punch lists for safety. We do punch lists for QA/QC. We create forms and fill them out every day for JSAs and safety paperwork. We use BuildPass every day."

For Taylor Pearson, the project engineer who touches the platform most, the win is in coordination — procurement, submittals, RFIs, inspections, and keeping the client in the loop. "It keeps things organized and helps us transmit information from our side to the client side, and keep that information highway open and clear." The built-in templates do the heavy lifting: "I like the template that's built out for pre-installation meetings. It helps get inspections done faster and keeps everything organized in a better way than the programs I've used before."

Two more features earn their keep on a Texas jobsite:

• Photo documentation that files itself. "I can take pictures of the whole site and mass-upload them in one day. BuildPass automatically sorts it for me — I don't have to create my own folders. It's smooth."
• English and Spanish, side by side. "We have people here who don't speak English at all. Having the site translated into Spanish helps them, and it helps me — I can read the English and know exactly what I just translated. It keeps everything cohesive for everybody."

And at the gate, orientations and sign-ons run on the worker's phone via QR code — fast to explain, fast to adopt, and the foundation for everything else.

Time Back in the Field

The payoff isn't a feature. It's where the superintendent gets to spend his day.

"BuildPass allows us to be on site for a longer period of time and actually be looking at things on site," David says. "Once everyone's signed up and using the platform, it creates an ecosystem that's perfect for construction — because everyone knows what's happening, day to day, at any given time."

That's the version of visibility that actually changes how a project runs: not another dashboard to check, but one place the team already checks.

"It doesn't matter if you have one trade or ten, ten people or two hundred. If you do it correctly and put the input in every day, you get a platform that feeds you all the right information, day to day. That's the best thing you can have to run a good project."

— David Guzman, Superintendent, Engen Contracting Inc. (ECI)

“This is working much better with BuildPass. Much faster. Much cleaner.”

David Guzman — Superintendent, Engen Contracting Inc.